A little further along. I’ve painted in her figure and left hand, started on the sink area, and retouched the background in a couple places.

If you look closely in the dark area of her figure you can see a few sprinkles of raindrops that got to it as I took this photo. Fortunately, they evaporated quickly without any damage when I dashed back inside.

I’ve been preoccupied lately with a family matter, and will remain so for awhile, so progress on this will be slow, but I’ll try to squeeze in time as I can. Not a too much new on this update to show, just the tiles on the back wall have been added.

One thing I wanted to mention about working in casein that I can use this as and example regards later varnishing procedures. After a various length of time, casein paint will cure to a point that it can be varnished by first adding a protection isolation coat. For that I use an acrylic medium from Liquitex called Gloss Medium and Varnish. Before I apply that, I like to test the casein paint surface to make sure the acrylic medium won’t disturb the paint. In this painting there are scrap areas above and below on the paper surface that will be trimmed off. I can use the paint on that area to test the acrylic. If such a space isn’t available, I can just paint a separate scrap piece of paper when I finish the painting, or paint on the back. That way the paint sample will cure for the same amount of time. If the casein is not disturbed I can safely apply the acrylic isolation coat, and once that dries I can continue to apply two coats of an acrylic-safe varnish. I find that 3 to 4 months is the average amount of time to wait for casein to properly cure, but it may take less time depending on the thickness of the paint.

I’ve gotten a little further on the painting. Added some neutral undertone washes, and started working on the cabinets, hand and cup. I had forgotten to put in the coffee maker in the layout, so I painted that in, too. It’s all still rough. I’ll polish it up as I get further along.

Okay, all the holiday trips and parties are over with, and I’ve caught up on the postponed chores, so now I can finally get back to that painting I was developing.

This is a sheet of heavy-weight watercolor paper (16 x 20″) that I’ve stretched to a wood frame. I showed in an earlier post how this frame was put together. The painting will be in casein, but here I’ve roughly laid out the placement of things in black ink. I’m using Higgins Black Magic shellac ink, which only gets to a dark gray value unless you paint over it in multiple layers. As such, it works well for a beginning undertone. I’m not too concerned with getting precise values now, since it’s mostly about the placement of things.

To test out how the coverage of casein paint over this ink will look, I painted over some scrap paper using various colors of cadmium red & yellow, cobalt blue, burnt umber, and titanium white. There’s a swatch of the undiluted Higgins ink on the left with some casein Ivory Black next to it to show the difference in value. The colors are still a bit transparent, even when undiluted, but I don’t mind if some of the ink undertone shows through. It will show more of the whole process in the final result, plus I can add an extra layer or two of paint to cover that up if necessary.

I’ve been fighting with my computer the last couple of days on a problem getting it to boot properly, and that’s been getting me distracted from an idea I got a few days ago watching TC with a friend. There was some cop show on, and a scene showed a woman standing at a window in her kitchen. It caused me to flash back to an old photo of mine I took of a friend in profile that I had wanted to develop into a finished piece, but had set it aside and forgotten about it. I roughly laid out the composition I had in mind in this sketch.

I dug up the photo from my files (her name is Catharine,) and made a more detailed sketch of her. This will help me get familiar with the shapes and forms of her head. The hand is my own that I slimmed down some to make it look more feminine.

Now I guess I’ll get back to the computer problem. I need to get that out of the way so there won’t be any more distractions (I hope.)